Books do furnish a room

Chatterton Square by E H Young My first novel by E H Young. Young seems to have been an interesting character. Her writings centre on the Clifton area of Bristol, called Upper Radstowe in the novels. She was a supporter of suffrage and a keen climber and mountaineer. She had a lifelong relationship with Ralph Henderson, a friend of her husband’s. After her husband’s death in the War she moved in with Henderson and his wife. Chatterton Square is the story of two families who live next to each other, one relatively happy and one relatively unhappy. The Blacketts are a married couple with three teenage daughters. They are the unhappy family, although Mrs Blackett thinks they are perfectly content (because he is perfectly content). The Frasers are happier, possibly because there is no man at the head of the house. Mr Fraser has left his wife and five children and Mrs Fraser seems generally content with her lot and has a very different approach to bringing up her children than does Mr Blackett. Living with the Fraser’s is Miss Spanner, an older unmarried woman and a friend of Mrs Fraser. Young shows three of the options open to women at the time (this was , written in 1947): unhappily married, separated and unmarried. It is set in 1938 with the threat of war looming and in the build up to the Munich agreement. This is an analysis of families and the role of women within them. There is no real “action”, because we know that is coming within the year: there is no real ending either, but that doesn’t seem to matter. The whole is character and interaction driven. Young’s portrait of Mr Blackett is very telling. He isn’t violent or abusive, the cruelty is more subtle and Mr Blackett wouldn’t, of course, recognise it as such. His sense of his own worth and maleness is well drawn: “He pitied widows but he distrusted them. They knew too much. As free as unmarried women, they were fully armed; this was an unfair advantage, and when it was combined with beauty, and air of well-being, a gaiety which, in women over forty had an unsuitable hint of mischief in it, he felt that in this easy conquest over, or incapacity for grief, all manhood was insulted, while all manhood, including his own, was probably viewed by that woman as a likely prey.” Unfortunately for him, his wife understands him and has learnt to manage his idiosyncrasies, as per this exchange when discussing whether Mr Blackett should take his eldest daughter on holiday to Europe: “I think you might feel quite different when you came back. Your mind would be refreshed. You would have other things to think about.” “But I don’t want to feel different!” Mr. Blackett exclaimed irritably. “And as for my mind, I wasn’t aware that it showed signs of flagging.” “Oh no,” Mrs. Blackett said pleasantly, “it’s too active,” and she gave him one of her rare, full looks. “Like a squirrel in a cage,” she added and carried away the tray before he could reply.” This is a look at a society which is about to undergo great change, but Young’s focus is also on relationships and women’s role. The interactions between the teenagers seem to be overshadowed by what we know is coming. This is a subtle and interesting novel, Young’s last, and would certainly prompt me to read more. 8 out of 10 Starting The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

Innocent Flowers: women in the Edwardian theatre by Julie Holledge This is a virago publication from 1981 about women of the Edwardian theatre, looking at the significant tensions between onstage and offstage roles and the impact of the Suffrage movement. I managed to find out a little about Julie Holledge (as I was unaware of her previously). She worked in the alternative theatre in the 1970s and moved to Australia in the early 1980s, spending the rest of her career teaching at Flinders University. She I an acknowledged expert on Ibsen and that also shows in this book as she charts how his plays were first received in the UK. There is a considerable section on the links between the theatre and the suffrage movement and at the end of the book three mini plays used as propaganda for the movement. Holledge looks at the life of Edith (Edy) Craig, daughter of Ellen Terry. This, of course involves the history of the Pioneer Players and Craig’s interesting home situation (a menage with Christabel Marshall and Clare (Tony) Attwood). Holledge makes extensive use of source materials and the book is well researched. The role of the actor managers meant that roles for women could be very limited and Holledge looks at the growth of independent theatre companies where women had more freedom. I also rediscovered Elizabeth Robins: “we had further seen how freedom in the practice of our art, how the bare opportunity to practise it at all, depended for the actress on, considerations humiliatingly different from those that confronted the actor. The stage career of an actress was inextricably involved in the fact that she was a woman and that those who were masters of the theatre were men. These conditions did not belong to art: they stultified art. We dreamed of escape through hard work, and through deliberate abandonment of the idea of making money” Which reminds me I must read The Convert soon. It is a story of struggle and difficulty rather than glamour, but it’s interesting and well written. 7 out of 10 Starting The Holiday by Stevie Smith

Underland by Robert Macfarlane This is much lauded and praised and now much translated. The title is self-explanatory, it is an exploration of earth’s underworlds (natural and created). There are caves and caverns, various underground systems including the many different underworlds of London and Paris. One point to make, all of the underlands in question are all in Europe or Greenland, so it is a very Eurocentric account, interesting though it is and well as Macfarlane writes. The descriptions of his perils and adventures (and he does take risks) lead to reflections about humanity and our effect on the landscape. I was reading this at the same time as Sebald and was struck by the similarities, both go off at tangents, although Macfarlane is not as narrow in range as Sebald. Macfarlane does try to connect with early humans and reflect on time: “The intimacy of that posture is moving to me – the dead and the living standing sole to sole. Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through from the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in open-handed encounter across time.” And: “Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel in around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink.” He also reflects on the nature of early human history: “In a cave within a scarp of karst, a figure inhales a mouthful of red ochre dust, places its left hand against the cave wall – fingers spread, thumb out, palm cold on the rock – and then blows the ochre hard against the hand’s back. There is an explosion of dust – and when the hand is lifted its ghostly print remains…The prints will survive for more than 35,000 years. Sign of what? Of joy? Of warning? Of art? Of life in the darkness?” Macfarlane is eminently quotable as can be seen, although once you have heard one description of getting wet and cold in impossible deep spaces, you have probably heard them all. Macfarlane does delve into myths about the underworld (Gilgamesh et al), but again Eurocentric. The most interesting part of the book for me was the part where Macfarlane talks about recent scientific thinking about the ways trees communicate and cooperate; inevitably named the “wood wide web”. He outlines an underground social network in the forest, based on mycorrhizal fungal species linking trees, not only of the same species, but between different species. This has been mapped using carbon isotopes. It appears that resources can be moved around in a wood in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. As Macfarlane says: “Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send immune-signalling compounds to one another. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant via the network that it should up-regulate its defensive response before the aphids reach it. It has been known for some time that plants communicate above ground in comparable ways, by means of diffusible hormones. But such airborne warnings are imprecise in their destinations. When the compounds travel by fungal networks, both the source and the recipient can be specified. Our growing comprehension of the forest network asks profound questions about where species begin and end, about whether a forest might be imagined as a super-organism and about what “trading, “sharing” or even “friendship” might mean between plants” There is much of interest here, but there is also a good deal of descriptive repetition and there is a complete omission of anything outside Europe. 7 out of 10 Starting Women in thirteenth century Lincolnshire

I have that Purcell as well Madeleine. I will delay it a while! Hope you enjoy the Ransom Riggs Hayley The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald This is allegedly a novel (it doesn’t feel like it). It has a first person narrator and it an account of and reflections on a walking tour in East Anglia (mainly Suffolk): from Lowestoft to Ditchingham. It describes places and people along the way, mainly people living in fairly large country houses! There are lots of tangents with passages on silkworm rearing and its history (there is a history of it in East Anglia), the writings of Sir Thomas Browne, the history of herring fishing in the North Sea, colonialism in the Congo with Conrad and Casement prominent, the description of a dissection viewed by Browne and Rembrandt, forays in Chateaubriand, Swinburne and Morton Peto follow. It does look at our relationship with the environment and makes a few pertinent points: “Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.” There is a general feel of desolation and decline with reflections on the effects of Dutch Elm disease. One of Sebald’s own friends Michael Hamburger also makes and appearance. The narrative feels restless and Sebald often writes in sentences that are lengthy and discursive. His descriptions of Browne’s sentences mirror his own: “In common with other English writers of the seventeenth century, Browne wrote out of the fullness of his erudition, deploying a vast repertoire of quotations and the names of authorities who had gone before, creating complex metaphors and analogies, and constructing labyrinthine sentences that sometimes extend over one or two pages, sentences that resemble processions or a funeral cortege in their sheer ceremonial lavishness. It is true that, because of the immense weight of the impediments he is carrying, Browne’s writing can be held back by the force of gravitation, but when he does succeed in rising higher and higher through the circles of his spiralling prose, borne aloft like a glider on warm currents of air, even today the reader is overcome by a sense of levitation.” Alan Bennett’s general point about Sebald resonates as well: “I persevere with Sebald but the contrivance of it, particularly his un-peopling of the landscape, never fails to irritate. ‘It was already afternoon, six in the evening when I reached the outskirts of Lowestoft. Not a living soul was about in the long streets.’ . . . The fact is, in Sebald nobody is ever about. This may be poetic but it seems to me a short cut to significance.” In themselves some of the observations and reflections are interesting despite (or because of) their melancholy. I now know a bit about herring fishing and Sir Thomas Browne, amongst other things! Will I persevere with Sebald? Not sure, but I won’t be in that much of a hurry to do so. 6 out of 10 Starting Lean, Fall, Stand by Jon Mcgregor

Bone China by Laura Purcell There’s a definite nod to Du Maurier with the Cornish setting, the house on the cliffs and the gothic nature. The protagonist is Hester Why (I found myself asking that question on a regular basis). She is fleeing London after a misunderstanding with a previous employer and taking up a post looking after an older woman, Miss Pinecroft. There are three different timelines and we see Miss Pinecroft in her youth. One of the themes is the search for a cure for TB. Miss Pinecroft’s father had bought the house for the caves underneath as there was a time when it was thought that cave and sea air was good for TB. Purcell introduces superstition and the folklore of fairie with the inevitable changeling myths. Cornish folklore is central to the story. Add a few doses of laudanum and gin, some odd goings on with china (possibly something to do with the title no doubt) with the bone part being a bit literal, lots of things going bump in the night and some gloomy corridors. There’s plenty of melodrama and odd goings on and atmosphere: “The wind howls and ravens about the house, crashing the branches of the ash trees together. The waves roar back. They are wild creatures, these elements. They will tear one another apart.” The whole thing is a bit of a mess as the strands somehow don’t hang together. The story rattles along at a good pace and if you like gothic tales that don’t make sense you may enjoy it. The ending is rushed and doesn’t make much sense (what am I saying!). I also won’t be able to look at bone china in quite the same way again! 5 out of 10 Starting The Mercies by Kiran Hargrave

The Gallows Pole by Ben Myers My second novel by Ben Myers. This is a historical novel set in eighteenth century Yorkshire, on the moors. It is the story of the Craggy Vale Coiners. Coiners clipped a small amount of metal from a coin and melted down the clippings to make new coins. The characters involved are historical and centred around the leader of the coiners “King David” Hartley, as described by Myers: “appeared of the earth, of the moors. A man of smoke and peat and heather and fire, his body built for the hills.” There is a museum to the coiners and Myers spoke to the descendants of Hartley whilst researching the book. This is a brutal, violent and very masculine book, there are very few female characters. As the Guardian review comments, just imagine the worst that can happen to a character, what Myers has in mind will be worse. The enemies are the oncoming Industrial Revolution and all representatives of The Crown and authority. The motto “Clip a coin and fudge the Crown” pretty much sums it up. There is a nod back to old legends like Robin Hood: “He who had poached and butchered a nobleman’s stag ... Hunger then it was that had led this poor soul to the gallows steps – a hunger for warm meat rather than cold-blooded murder. Not greed but necessity.” There is a definite harking back in the face of industrial development: “we lived as clans … protection was our purpose – protection from any incomers. That and the providing of food and fire, and seeding your women. You hunted and you defended and you fought for your corner of England under the great green canopy. You lived proud and you celebrated your fathers that spawned you and honoured your mothers that birthed you.” The narrative is interspersed with extracts from a diary written by Hartley whilst in jail in York (imaginary I think). There is a six part TV series being filmed for the BBC. Myers writes landscape and nature rather well and his turns of phrase are excellent. He also uses folklore and wildlife lore which is woven into the narrative. It is an analysis of power and where it really lies and a fable about standing against the growth of imperial power: “It’s time to split the coins proper and make the money that is ours. It’s time to clip a coin and fudge the crown. It’s time to let the 'persons of dubious parentage' know that the only law is our law… valley man fight and valley men sing and valley men bow to none …. fudge the king because you can be sure the king is already fudgeing you … A hand loom in a wool loft never killed a child. Only the men from the cities with their stone cathedrals of mass production killed children,” It will be interesting to see how the TV production fares. 8 out of 10 Starting The Sacred Combe by Thomas Maloney

Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood Something of a Christmas ghost story. There are very few characters. The primary character is Leah and her point of view makes up the novel. Leah has recently lost her son and husband and is still coping with her grief. They had been looking at a farmhouse to purchase which coincidentally used to be in Leah’s family over a hundred years ago. After her loss Leah sells up and purchases the remote farmhouse, which is on the Yorkshire Moors. It is rapidly approaching Christmas and there is snow on the ground. The farm and house are old and there is an orchard with lots of mistletoe on the trees and Littlewood finds lots of ways to describe snow: “The snow was constantly changing: now rose-tinted or grey, now golden or lavender, made new with every dawn or noon or evening and yet just as cold.” The haunting starts almost as soon as she arrives and consists of Leah suddenly finds herself in the past watching scenes from long ago when her ancestors ran the farm. She discovers some rather sinister history which begins to play out. There are a few surly locals and another local farm where Leah gets to know the occupants a little: their ancestors were also local. It’s pretty gothic, the plot is obviously unbelievable, but Littlewood makes good use of the natural world. As ghost stories go it’s ok, good for a dark winter night and Littlewood weaves in some folklore elements as well. 6 out of 10 Starting The Wood by John Lewis-Stempel

Natives by Akala This is a combination of memoir and polemic about class and race and its intersection. It is analytical and looks at the history of empire. It has been compared to The Autobiography of Malcolm X (by David Olusoga amongst others). Akala is a rapper, poet, activist, author, Corbyn supporter, MOBO award winner, founder of the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company amongst other things. His older sister is the rapper Ms. Dynamite. Akala has a Jamaican father and a Scottish mother. The memoir parts are particularly poignant and he makes his motives clear: “I was not born with an opinion of the world but it clearly seemed that the world had an opinion of people like me. I did not know what race and class supposedly were but the world taught me very quickly, and the irrational manifestations of its privileges forced me to search for answers. I did not particularly want to spend a portion of a lifetime studying these issues, it was not among my ambitions as a child, but I was compelled upon this path very early.” He does not pull any punches when it comes to the police and to the fate of many of his peers: “Yes, you have survived, but it is bittersweet; some of the best minds of your generation have been wasted, the children that grew up with the safety blankets of money and whiteness have gotten twice as far working half as hard, they are still having the same cocaine parties that they were having twenty years ago and they still have not ever been searched by the police once, let alone had their parties raided or been choke-slammed to death”. Akala went to schools where he knew his teachers disliked him, He was sent to a Pan-African Saturday school where he was taught black history. The school stories illustrate how bad things were in the 1980s. At the age of seven he was put into a class for those who had special educational needs (he was reading Lord of the Rings at the time!). He also shocked his teacher when she told him Wilberforce had ended the slave trade and he responded by challenging her, using what he was taught at the Saturday school. He first stopped by the police aged twelve, became involved with gangs and carried a knife. His life did change through music, learning and support from others. In between the memoir parts is analysis of class, racism and black history. Akala looks at the socially constructed nature of race, with sections on the slave trade, the British atrocities in Kenya in the 1950s, Windrush, comparisons with the US, Cuba and South Africa, whiteness and much more. The section on Haiti is particularly good. He isn’t greatly optimistic about the future either: “I am not particularly optimistic about the future and I hope to be proved spectacularly wrong. I fear the only question for the life of someone like me born in 2018 is how extreme the tragedies and carnage they will surely live through will be….tragedies will inevitably occur…many of these coming tragedies will be racially charged…” This isn’t an easy read and Akala debunks a lot of myths, including the one that despite it all things are getting better. 9 out of 10 Starting Innocent Flowers: Women in the Edwardian Theatre by Julie Hollege

It's worth a look! The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison by Ann Morley and Liz Stanley An unconventional biography published by the Women’s Press in the early 1980s. It debunks some of the myths around Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette who died when she stepped out in front of the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby. The first part of the book is a reprint of The Life of Emily Wilding Davison by Gertrude Colmore; written hastily after she died and long out of print. What Morley and Stanley have also done is access many records in the various archives and suffragist records and newspapers that had not previously been used. They set out to dispel the myth that Davison was a suicidal fanatic and do so by setting her in her proper historical context. They set her in the context of a remarkable network of women and show that her struggle was not just for the vote, which was only a starting point but for a wider socialist and feminist agenda. Davison’s beliefs covered vegetarianism and animal rights as well. There is an interesting analysis of the leadership of the movement and their relationship with some of the more radical elements of the movement. There are also accounts of periods of time in prison and Davison was force fed quite a number of times following hunger strikes. Morley and Stanley also research the women around Davison, many of whom are less well known and they turn up some interesting characters, Mary Leigh in particular. This is an interesting and innovative biography which challenges the myths about Davison, sets her in the context of a militant movement, and explains the level of state violence used against the suffragists. 8 out of 10 Starting The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald

King Rat by China Mieville This is Mieville’s first novel and can be described as urban fantasy, set in 1990s London. It also has the feel of a graphic novel. There is an element of fairy tale as it is a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Inevitably the plot stretches credulity and the language is strong. Saul shares a flat with his father. He returns one day and his father has been murdered. His is arrested for the crime. Whilst in custody he is broken out by a character called King Rat and sees a whole new side of London. He also discovers he is half rat ad learns about his new abilities. The reasons for his situation gradually become clear, there is danger from the Ratcatcher. Saul also meets the King of Birds (LopLop) and the King of Spiders (Anansi). The danger comes in the form of a chap called Peter who plays the flute. The Music can charm any species and he is after King Rat, who escaped him in Hamelin. Because Saul is part rat part human he is immune to the music. The piper wants to kill him because he is immune and King Rat wants to use him to kill the Piper. The Piper begins to work his way into the lives of Saul’s friends. The plot has plenty of holes in it and there are characters that are underdeveloped and barely used. As a result this does feel like a first novel. There is a strong sense of place and the background of jungle and drum’n’bass music gives a sense of time as well. There are a few clever ideas. The idea that invisibility is more about people choosing not to see you than you being invisible is pertinent. There is also an earnestness about this which doesn’t sit easy with the subject matter; the character of the Piper is one dimensional. The strongest character is King Rat himself: “I’m the big-time crime boss. I’m the one that stinks. I’m the scavenger chief, I live where you don’t want me. I’m the intruder. I killed the usurper, I take you to safekeeping. I killed half your continent one time. I know when your ships are sinking. I can break your traps across my knee and eat the cheese in your face and make you blind with my wee. I’m the one with the hardest teeth in the world, I’m the whiskered boy. I’m the Duce of the sewers, I run the underground. I’m the king. (…) I’m King Rat.” Mieville’s politics show through a little clumsily, which didn’t worry me as I mostly agree with them. There ae flaws but Mieville is always worth reading. 6 out of 10 Starting Chatterton Square by E H Young

Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley I really enjoyed Mozley’s first novel Elmet, I didn’t enjoy this one. It is set in a run-down section of Soho. The word stew in old English means brothelIt concerns a clash of cultures. The novel centres around an old building in Soho, the top floors of which are a brothel. The owner of the building has inherited her father’s wealth and property at a young age (he is a deceased criminal/gangland figure). She wants to tear the building down and redevelop it as upmarket flats/restaurants etc. There are nods to the history of the place and the changing nature of the population: “After the war, the concrete came, and parallel lines, and precise angles that connected earth to sky. Houses were rebuilt, shops were rebuilt, and new paving stones were laid. The dead were buried. The past was buried. There were new kinds of men and new kinds of women. There was art and music and miniskirts and sharp haircuts to match the skyline.” The rampant capitalist is called Agatha, she inherited her father’s minder (Roster) and has a rather elegant Borzoi (there is a very unpleasant incident with a Yorkshire Terrier in this which seemed entirely gratuitous). The brothel consist of a number of women, but the main players are a Nigerian sex worker called Precious and her maid Tabitha. There are also a number of people who primarily live of the streets who congregate in the basements and on the streets around. Two of them have the sobriquets Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee. The local pub the Aphra Benn also features and in particular Robert, an aging ex-enforcer who is a regular at the brothel. Floating around all this are a group of twenty somethings who are just starting to make their way in life. Their links to the central participants are very tangential and it isn’t at all clear why they are actually in the novel. There is a fair amount of what is meant to comic ribaldry. I felt that the attempts to introduce a comedic element did not work. The portrayal of the sex workers is really problematic and a lot of the humour of the novels comes from them, but also feels like it is at their expense. When Vollmann writes about sex workers he gives them agency (or has in those of his works I have read), but here I’m really don’t think that happens. They are the underdogs and the reader is meant to feel sympathy, but they are also the butt of the jokes. There have been issues like this in Soho over recent years with police raids and the like and protests from sex workers; all this is well documented. Mozley uses this, but this is far from a plea for the marginalised and the issue of trafficking is not addressed at all. What happens here is that a story about gentrification is spiced up by the addition of sex workers who make jokes about “blow job counters at Tesco”. I think Mozley misrepresents genuine dilemmas and a genuine history of protest. And the ending is a complete mess. 3 out of 10 Starting Bone China by Laura Purcell

Thank you for the kind words Hayley. I did quite enjoy Company of Liars. Mr Godley's Phantom by Mal Peet Mr Godley’s Phantom This is Mal Peet’s last novel and it is published as it was when he died. It is in actual fact a novella and could easily be read in a sitting. It is part ghost story, part thriller/crime story, part love story and part reflection on the effects of war. It is set after the Second World War and the protagonist is Martin Heath. He has fought in Italy and was one of the soldiers that liberated Bergen/Belsen. As a result he has what would now be called PTSD and is having problems settling into civilian life. Martin takes a job at a remote house in moorland Devon. His employer is the Mr Godley of the title, he lives in a manor house alone, having lost his son in the First World War. There are a couple of female employees, one of whom lives in and an elderly gardener. Martin’s duties include being a general handyman and driver. The car is a Rolls Royce phantom (as in the title), which plays a significant role in the novel. Martin’s PTSD is significant: “The projector whirred. The images flickered, steadied. He could not stop them….The silent skeletons, who yet moved on legs of bone, walking towards him, slow as dreamers but all eyes. The others, heaped, skulls muddled with shin bones, claws, shrunken genitals. shhhhhhh and slurry and decomposition. Martin had felt neither rage nor even revulsion. Rather, it was like discovering that he had contracted an incurable disease; that and having inhaled the miasma of death, he could never be well again” Mr Godley, now very elderly has had his own losses. His son and later his wife (who drowned herself). Peet had completed the manuscript before his death, but left a few side notes. These have been used by the publisher as the titles for the various parts of the book. One in particular resonates when considering the relationship between the two men: “You fit my wounds exactly” I got a bit more from this than I expected. As a novel it’s never quite sure what it wants to be, but Peet does combine the various elements well. A brief Halloween read. 7 out of 10 Starting Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood

Thank you for the kind words Hayley. I did quite enjoy Company of Liars. Mr Godley's Phantom by Mal Peet Mr Godley’s Phantom This is Mal Peet’s last novel and it is published as it was when he died. It is in actual fact a novella and could easily be read in a sitting. It is part ghost story, part thriller/crime story, part love story and part reflection on the effects of war. It is set after the Second World War and the protagonist is Martin Heath. He has fought in Italy and was one of the soldiers that liberated Bergen/Belsen. As a result he has what would now be called PTSD and is having problems settling into civilian life. Martin takes a job at a remote house in moorland Devon. His employer is the Mr Godley of the title, he lives in a manor house alone, having lost his son in the First World War. There are a couple of female employees, one of whom lives in and an elderly gardener. Martin’s duties include being a general handyman and driver. The car is a Rolls Royce phantom (as in the title), which plays a significant role in the novel. Martin’s PTSD is significant: “The projector whirred. The images flickered, steadied. He could not stop them….The silent skeletons, who yet moved on legs of bone, walking towards him, slow as dreamers but all eyes. The others, heaped, skulls muddled with shin bones, claws, shrunken genitals. shhhhhhh and slurry and decomposition. Martin had felt neither rage nor even revulsion. Rather, it was like discovering that he had contracted an incurable disease; that and having inhaled the miasma of death, he could never be well again” Mr Godley, now very elderly has had his own losses. His son and later his wife (who drowned herself). Peet had completed the manuscript before his death, but left a few side notes. These have been used by the publisher as the titles for the various parts of the book. One in particular resonates when considering the relationship between the two men: “You fit my wounds exactly” I got a bit more from this than I expected. As a novel it’s never quite sure what it wants to be, but Peet does combine the various elements well. A brief Halloween read. 7 out of 10 Starting Mistletoe by Alison Littlewood

All among the barley by Melissa Harrison An author I have never read before and a novel about rural England in the 1930s with a fourteen year old unreliable narrator. What could go wrong? Actually, not much. Another writer I respect, Jon McGregor, called this a masterpiece and yes, it is really good. The setting is rural Suffolk in the early 1930s on a fairly poor tenant farm. It is narrated by fourteen year old Edith Mather, which adds a coming of age element. The Great Depression is one of the backdrops. The other is the Great War which casts a long shadow and the gaps left in families are still obvious. There are tensions between what are called the “old ways” and modern farming methods. The novel revolves around the arrival of a stranger, Constance FitzAllen who has come to record and document old farming methods, songs, pastimes, recipes and all things agricultural. She is treated warily at first, but gradually gains some trust. She also takes time to get to know Edith, who is shy and rather bookish and has reached the point where she has to think about what to do with her life. Harrison creates a sense of place in terms of the farm and the natural world. There are maps at the beginning of the novel, one of the farm and one of the farm in relation to the nearby village of Elmbourne. Neil Gower the illustrator says of the maps: “The completeness of Harrison’s maps indicated that they had been an integral part of the novel’s creation. She inhabits the landscape intimately, like her characters, who seem to have emerged straight from it as readily and naturally as the flints they clear from the soil each year.” The writing about nature is also very strong: “On a cornland farm, such as ours, the pause between haysel and harvest is like a held breath. The summer lanes are edged with dog-roses and wild clematis, the hedges thronged with young birds. At last the cuckoos leave, and you are glad of it, having heard their note for weeks; but the landrails creak on interminably, invisible among the corn. The nights are brief and warm, the Dog Star dazzles overhead; the moon draws a shadow from every blade of wheat. All day, dust rises from unmade roads and hangs in the air long after a cart or a motor-car passes. Everything waits.” This however is no rural idyll. The farm is struggling. Edie’s father tends towards drink and doesn’t like to be contradicted and everyone knows he is violent towards Edie’s mother. The newcomer Connie it transpires is a fascist and there is much about strength and tradition and England for the English. The target then was the Jews and in the after note Harrison reminds the reader of Orwell’s essay on Antisemitism in England. Her views find some support and some opposition from union members and socialists among the farm hands. This, of course, leads to more tensions. Edie is trying to negotiate growing up. She is fascinated by stories of witches and wise women, wondering if she is part of that tradition herself. At the beginning of the book she is reading Lolly Willowes, which helps to fuel her imagination. She starts to get attention from boys and from one boy in particular. There is uncertainty on all sides: “It isn’t easy to conceive when you are growing up, that the world could be any different than how you find it, for the things you first encounter are what normality comes to consist of, and only the passage of time teaches you that your childhood could have been otherwise.” Edie’s narration hints at a number of things throughout the novel which begin to add up. A glimpse of her fifty years later in Thatcher’s Britain highlights another sinister aspect of twentieth century British history. All is not as it seems and this is not a sentimental novel, there are flaws in the rural idyll. 9 out of 10 Starting Mr Godley's Phantom by Mal Peet

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier My first foray into Du Maurier. This combines (sort of) romance and thriller with an edge of gothic. Du Maurier is a good storyteller and this one has a first person narrator. It is set in what seems to be the mid nineteenth century (there is a corpse hanging on a gibbet early in the book). Philip is a young man of 23/24. He is an orphan and has been brought up by his cousin (older by twenty years) Ambrose. It is mainly set on a Cornish estate and the household is all male (including all the servants). So Philip has been brought up without knowing or understanding women. This book is really about male power and male fragility. Philip has a guardian who will manage his affairs until he is 25. Ambrose has poor health and decides to go to Italy for the winter. Here he meets his half Italian cousin Rachel (ten years younger than Ambrose and ten years older than Philip) and falls in love: they marry. Philip is of course horrified (at a distance as he is still in Cornwall). Ambrose stays in Italy for a while. His letters become more rambling and he starts to complain of headaches and talks about his suspicions of Rachel. Ambrose dies and Philip is convinced she killed him. Rachel eventually turns up in Cornwall. Inevitably Philip falls in love with her. There follows lots of male sulking, some fun with wills, jewellery, poisons, sex, jealousy and much more. The more perceptive will realise that Philip is a rather unreliable narrator and there is a sort of whodunit throughout. Philip is not a likeable character, he is petulant, privileged and has a sense of entitlement, others are of like account. It is important to point out that we only ever see Rachel through the eyes of men like Philip and Ambrose. Rachel’s choices are prescribed by her sexuality and gender by the men around her. Philip has his thoughts about men and women: “We were surely different, with our blunter comprehension, moving more slowly to the compass points, while they, erratic and unstable, were blown about their course by winds of fancy.” Rachel’s determination not to remarry completely baffles Philip. Du Maurier quite purposely I think, genders the places involved. Cornwall/the estate is clearly masculine and Florence clearly feminine. As Sally Beauman points out in the virago introduction Du Maurier: “writes in the guise of a man, in a novel that explores, inter alia, the full implications of male authority” Du Maurier has written a pretty good account of misogyny and male privilege. Rachel remains an enigma because we only know her through male eyes. 7 out of 10 Starting The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison by Liz Stanley and Ann Morley

Square Haunting by Francesca Wade This book focuses on five women who all lived in Mecklenberg Square in London at various points between the wars. The link (apart from the Square and the fact they are all middle class) is the theme of female autonomy and there is a Room of One’s Own thread running through it. There are two academics: the historian Eileen Power and the classicist Jane Harrison. The poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle (HD). Novelist and writer Dorothy L Sayers. Finally and inevitably Virginia Woolf. The Square is close to the British Museum and at times all of them used the Reading Room there. The title is taken from a 1925 diary entry by Woolf when she talks about the joys of “street sauntering and square haunting”. They didn’t all live there at the same time and they didn’t know each other well, although some were acquainted. Wade tells a story about Woolf eating biscuits in the kitchen at one of Power’s parties. Multiple biographies are quite the thing these days, but Wade does have a particular focus, which she tends to stick to: autonomy, ‘the right to talk, walk, and write freely, to live invigorating lives’. I was particularly interested in the section on Eileen Power, I have admired her historical work since the 1970s. “I am extremely jubilant at present, because I have, after much travail & tribulation, found a charming half-house in Mecklenburgh Square, looking on to an enormous garden of trees & I hope to move in at the end of term. I have found a convenient friend to share it, of the sort who is never there except on weekends, when I am often away. My idea of life is to have enormous quantities of friends but to live alone. And I do not know whether Girton or the study of medieval nunneries did more to convince me that I was not born to live in a community!” Power’s work is much underrated and she comes across as an impressive character. The links are tenuous, although each essay (which is effectively what they are) has some interest in its own right. Wade sums up her aims thus: “These chapters capture each woman in a moment of transition, of hope tempered by uncertainty, as she left behind a version of herself in the home or community she was abandoning, and sought to reinvent her life in a new place. . . . During the time all these women spent there . . . they produced groundbreaking writing, initiated radical collaboration, started (and ended) significant relationships and thought deeply about their values and ambitions.” Wade also draws links between some of the women: “Harrison’s work gave Woolf a new, subversive model of history which informed all her subsequent novels and essays: one whose revelations offered powerful ‘mothers’ for women to ‘think back through.’ And which revealed as man-made—and flimsy—the construct on which patriarchal society rests.” I also discovered that Mary Beard has written a biography of Harrison, so I will be looking out for that. Whilst I think there are issues with the concept of this, for me, there was enough here to maintain interest. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting The Transgender Issue by Shon Faye

Still Life by A S Byatt This is the last book in my Reading Women challenge this year; 35 books in all (I’m already planning next year). This is from the 1980s section (a book from each year of the 1980s). It is also the second part of a quartet (a fact I wasn’t aware of). The quartet is about the Potter family and as it is called the Frederica Quartet, one of the main characters, Frederica, is one of the daughters of the family. This book covers her Cambridge years (from just before to just after); deep joy!! Stephanie, her older sister has left academia and married a clergyman and produces two children during the book. Marcus her younger brother is portrayed as being intelligent but problematic. Byatt here may be trying to portray someone on the autistic spectrum. Presumably the first in the series covered childhood and Stephanie’s university career. This is set in the mid-1950s and is very much a novel of the English middle classes of the sort that I am beginning to feel I have been put on this earth to warn against. This is articulate, clever with assorted intelligent dons and plenty of analysis of poetry, and religion. The poor are not present apart from being there to be done unto by the goodly middle class folk. There is a bit of stuff about painting, hence the title. There are some odd names here too, some of which for me evoked Hardy and not in a good way. The younger brother Marcus apparently has what would now be called PTSD, following an incident in the first book. This portrayal for me didn’t really work and seemed very muddled. Another annoyance was the author suddenly intervening, like this: “The language with which I might try to order Frederica's hectic and somewhat varied sexual life in 1954-55 was not available to Frederica then.” And this: “The germ of this novel was a fact that was also a metaphor: a young woman, with a child, looking at a tray of earth in which unthinned seedlings on etiolated pale stalks died in the struggle for survival. She held in her hand the picture of a flower, the seed packet with its bright image. Nasturtium, Giant Climbing, mixed.” This became annoying and I felt there was really no need for it. It is undoubtedly clever and perceptive and perhaps captures a time and place for a certain class. There are lots of clever references and literary links and some will love this, I didn’t. 6 out of 10 Starting Natives by Akala

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland Well, this is a pandemic novel, set in 1348 in England, the year of the Plague. I have found myself reading a bit of rather trashy historical fiction recently and have been wondering about the attraction. It may be my age I suppose, it’s certainly escapism. I think sometimes the stresses and strains of battling against injustice and working for Vulnerable Adults in what often seems like a ceaseless losing battle means that I need something in my reading diet that moves me away from it. This appears to be it! Unfortunately my critical faculties seem to wake up or at least wander back when I sit down to write a revue. It is pretty loosely based on The Canterbury Tales and there is also a touch of the Decameron lurking in there as well. It involves a group of travellers thrown together, each with a particular secret (inevitably). There are healers, sorcerers, storytellers, musicians, ex-priests and I did begin to wonder if I was playing Dungeons and Dragons. They also appear to be being followed by a wolf (there were still wolves in England at that time), which they heard at night but never saw; “We were just preparing to settle down for another cold night when we heard the wolf again. A wolf’s howl, however often you hear it, still sends shivers down your spine.” The whole lot are pretty disreputable and each has a story which unfolds. The thriller element kicks in as they begin to die one by one and it all begins to feel a bit Agatha Christie. There is also a state of the nation feel about it (possibly then and now) as Maitland brings it the plight of the Jews in fourteenth century England, being queer, xenophobia (dislike of foreigners is nothing new), religious superstition, fear of those who do not conform, incest and a well signalled twist at the end. Some of the stories are not given much depth and there is a bit of unreliable narration. The whole thing falls apart a bit at the end and I felt Maitland was unsure how to end it. The whole thing is a bit of a mess but it had a soporific effect on me at the end of the day 6 out of 10 Starting King Rat by China Mieville

George beneath a Paper Moon by Nina Bawden This is a 1974 novel from Nina Bawden and it was an oddity which didn’t know what it intended to be. Bawden herself said: “I intended a comedy, a love story, a thriller. And maybe it’s also a bit of a moral tale.” Unfortunately Bawden attempts to add all of these things, most of them in the last three or four chapters. So the whole thing is a bit of a mess. The novel is about the George of the title who is a successful travel agent. George sets up adventures for others and doesn’t have them himself. He feels “the important things happened while his back was turned”. He has a fairly comfortable life and is in his mid-30s. He has good friends in Sam and Claire (a married couple) with whom he was at university. Sam and Claire have a fifteen year old daughter, Sally. Fifteen years earlier George and Claire had an affair because Claire wanted a child and it was very unlikely that Sam would be able to provide one. It is therefore likely that Sally is George’s child. Just to complicate things and add a Nabokov element George is in love with Sally. However Sally also has a teenage crush on George. Bawden is good at creating unsympathetic characters and George marries Leila and decides to be a supportive husband, you can imagine how that goes. The whole thing moves to Turkey for the end of the book. Introduce a few suave English diplomats and assorted locals who clearly do not know the “English” way of doing things. Sally is on sort of exchange with a Turkish girl and there are assorted youthful political things going on (Sally is about seventeen by now). George and Leila are there as well. The comedic touches are present throughout. How then do you sort out the tangle of the moral, love and thriller narrative threads? Of course, you have an earthquake. 5 and a half out of 10 Starting All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison

Thank you Hayley

Dead Man's Walk by Larry McMurtry This is the first chronologically of the Lonesome Dove novels, but the third written. I think it is also the first Western novel I have read. It introduces McCrae and Call the central characters in Lonesome Dove just as they join the Texas Rangers, both are about twenty. This is set in the 1840s and involves two expeditions into the wilderness and several encounters with Native Americans (some of whom feature in future books), Comanche and Apache. Both expeditions are shambolic. McMurtry is a creative writer and his powers of description are good. The characters did feel a bit flat at times and I suspect some of this is backfilling for the later novels in the timeline. There is no idealising or romanticizing the old west and there is plenty of brutality from all sides. McMurtry can carry a story and this is easy to read, containing all the things you would expect from a classic western. Some of this was a bit surreal and by the end it felt like the author had painted the surviving characters into a bit of a corner. The device used to get them out of it is completely unbelievable. McMurtry does manage to treat both sides of the conflict with Native Americans fairly equitably without exploring the real tensions present. The focus is on the action. I think a lot of the point of the book was to get McCrae and Call from A to B. But I will read more. 7 out of 10 Starting George under a Paper Moon by Nina Bawden

The Quickening by Rhiannon Ward This is a slice of gothic historical fiction set in 1925. The main protagonist is a photographer, Louisa Drew, who lost her husband in the War and her two sons in the flu epidemic. She receives a commission to photograph some of the contents of a country house whose occupants are moving to India. Inevitably the house has a gothic and sinister feel to it. Not only that the occupants intend to re-enact a séance that took place thirty years earlier, which ended badly. Those who were there originally are to be there again, including a certain Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife. Throw into the mix, a curse, sinister goings on in the ice house, changes in temperature, ghostly music, possible ghostly sightings and footprints in the snow. Louisa is heavily pregnant and has pretty much abandoned her new husband to take the commission. Of course the house doesn’t feel right to Louisa from the start and it appears to dislike her! Louisa is assisted by the son of the journalist who was at the original séance and is reporting on this one. There is a cast of the upstairs and downstairs elements of the household, some of whom know more than they are letting on. The novel is from the perspective of Louisa with periodic flashbacks to the original séance. If you like gothic fiction you are likely to like this and it’s ideal for this time of year. I found the romance subplot irritating (that may be me!!) Some of the menace was a little low key and some of the working out of the ending didn’t convince, but it’s best not to overthink this. 6 and a half out of 10 Starting Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa A collection of eleven short stories, definitely Gothic, all linked in subtle and disturbing ways almost circular in the way they connect. The prose is spare and matter of fact. In the first story a woman goes into a bakery to buy strawberry shortbread: “I’m buying them for my son. Today is his birthday.” “Really? Well, I hope it’s a happy one. How old is he?” “Six. He’ll always be six. He’s dead.” This is more Poe than King, but could be taking place anywhere, in any place. There is plenty of death, decay and food, much of the death takes place slightly off-screen: there is a certain amount of subtlety. Ogawa plays with death, with age, with gender and does so very well as there are plenty of twists and surprises. Age and gender often seem to blur into each other as do the characters. There is an elegance to the storytelling. Out of place details can be more powerful than gore and monsters. The stories are set in an unnamed city. At the centre is a clock tower which seems to pop up in a number of the stories: “The bell in the clock tower began to ring. A flock of pigeons lifted into the sky. As the fifth chime sounded, a door beneath the clock opened and a little parade of animated figurines pirouetted out—a few soldiers, a chicken, and a skeleton. Since the clock was very old, the figurines were slightly discolored, their movements stiff and awkward. The chicken’s head swiveled about as if to squawk; the skeleton danced. And then, from the door, an angel appeared, beating her golden wings.” Images and devices repeat themselves. I think there is probably a key to all this. There is a writer who appears periodically and I wonder whether the author is inserting her into her work. This is different and disturbing, definitely one to read as the nights draw in. 7 and a half out of 10 Starting My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier

Zami: A new spelling of my name by Audre Lorde “Maybe that is all any bravery is, a stronger fear of not being brave.” “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.” Lorde refers to this as a biomythography, which is a combination of biography, myth and history. Lorde says that the word Zami is a Carriacou word (Carriacou is a small island in the Caribbean where Lorde’s mother was born) which means women who work together as friends and lovers. This is, amongst other things, a book about love. It follows Lorde’s formative years and takes us up to around 1960. There is a great deal about racism, being a lesbian in 1950s America, friendship and community and Lorde’s difficult relationship with her mother. “Images of women flaming like torches adorn and define the borders of my journey, stand like dykes between me and the chaos. It is the images of women, kind and cruel, that lead me home.” This is not an easy read and repays time and careful reading. It is a great book, one that really should be much more widely known, especially here in the UK. Lorde expresses herself very well: “I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. There were no mothers, no sisters, no heroes. We had to do it alone, like our sister Amazons, the riders on the loneliest outposts of the Kingdom of Dahomey. We, young and Black and fine and gay, sweated out our first heartbreaks with no school nor office chums to share that confidence over lunch hour. Just as there were no rings to make tangible the reason for our happy secret smiles, there were no names nor reason given or shared for the tears that messed up the lab reports or the library bills. We were good listeners, and never asked for double dates, but didn’t we know the rules? Why did we always seems to think friendships between women were important enough to care about? Always we moved in a necessary remoteness that made “What did you do this weekend?” seem like an impertinent question. We discovered and explored our attention to women alone, sometimes in secret, sometimes in defiance, sometimes in little pockets that almost touched (“Why are those little Black girls always either whispering together or fighting?”) but always alone, against a greater aloneness. We did it cold turkey, and although it resulted in some pretty imaginative tough women when we survived, too many of us did not survive at all.” Lorde writes very well and has the ability to sum things up in a rather pithy way, as she sums up the 1950s: "The Rosenbergs had been executed, the transistor radio had been invented, and frontal lobotomy was the standard solution for persistent deviation." Lorde writes about her lived experience of marginalisation and she really is a pioneer. One of my favourite reads. 9 out of 10 Starting Underland by Robert Macfarlane

West by Carys Davies This feels like an extended short story and could easily be read in one sitting. The setting is the US in the early nineteenth century. It feels a bit like a fable and consequently the reader has to suspend a certain amount reliance on historical accuracy. Cyrus (Cy) Bellman lives in Pennsylvania where he breeds mules. His wife has died and he lives with his daughter Bess who is ten years old. He reads reports of an expedition to the Midwest (largely unexplored) where the remains have been found of very large creatures, presumably dinosaurs or possibly mammoths. Bellman speculates that these creatures may still be living out there. Bellman decides to go looking for them. Bess is to stay where she is, to be watched over by his sister Julie and the hired hand on the farm Elmer Jackson. There are no prizes for parenting here. Bellman buys himself a stovepipe hat and takes lots of trinkets and tools to trade with the locals. A French trader provides him with a young Native American guide when he reaches a trading station and off he goes into the wilderness. Time passes, two years and Bess is growing up whilst Elmer Jackson is turning into a stalker. Bellman does question what he has done: “You had so many ways of deciding which way to live your life. It made his head spin to think of them. It hurt his heart to think that he had decided on the wrong way.” The narrative switches between Bellman and his daughter. Bellman is searching for monsters that don’t exist whilst his daughter is navigating her way around those that do. The writing is spare and luminous but I found myself not really engaging with the wilderness part of the narrative: “The intermittent appearance of natives now, though he’d come by this time to expect it, amazed him: the presence of people in the vast wilderness around them. Even though he was used to the rhythm of their journey – that he and the boy could travel for a month and see no one, and then without warning encounter a large camp, or a group of savages walking or fishing. Noisy children and men whose bodies gleamed with grease and coal, women loaded like mules with bundles of buffalo meat. A whole mass of them together, undifferentiated and strange, and present suddenly amidst the course grass and the trees, the rocks and the river, beneath the enormous sky. All of them wanting to touch his red hair. Half of them enthralled by his compass, the other half trying to examine his knife and the contents of his tin chest. All of them fearful of his guns and eager to traffic a little raw meat for some of his treasures.” Bellman is out there for over two years in winters where he would have frozen to death meeting people who had no reason to welcome settlers who displaced them from their lands. There is a whimsicality to this, which is fine, but I struggled with the juxtaposition to the sheer unbelievability of half of the tale. 6 out of 10 Starting Revenge by Yoko Ogawa